If Stones Could Speak

As Joshua crosses the Jordan River into the promised land, he
instructs representatives from each tribe to pick up a stone,
saying, "When your children ask you in the time to come,
What do these stones mean to you? then you shall tell
them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones
shall be a memorial to the people of Israel" (Joshua 4:6-7).
The redactors of the book of Joshua anticipated a time when
testimony and memory would be all that stood between a people and
the extinction of their history. In a similar way, the authors of
two recent books argue for the role of memory and testimony in
recovering histories that genocide would extinguish.

Victoria Sanford and Courtney Angela Brkic are contemporary
witnesses - albeit in different ways - to the necessity of
recovering histories of genocide. Both authors describe their
work at the exhumations of mass graves for men, women, and
children, civilians killed in cold blood by armed forces.
Sanfords Buried Secrets is an exhaustive account of
the Guatemalan armys planned genocide of the indigenous
Mayan peoples in Guatemala during the 1980s. Her work comes out
of her research as an anthropologist and is informed by her
involvement in a truth commission called the Commission for
Historical Clarification. In an interesting contrast, The
Stone Fields is a memoir-like account of Brkics
experiences as a researcher and young volunteer on U.N.
exhumations in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her book contains personal
narratives of her familys history in the same region.

Buried Secrets is the culmination of Sanfords
years with the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation
exhuming clandestine graves. These graves are
"clandestine," she notes, only from the perspective of
the silence the state imposes on communities that experienced the
violence. The results of the Guatemalan armys scorched
earth campaign against indigenous Maya in the highlands included
440 massacres and as many villages burned to the ground, 1.5
million people displaced, and up to 150,000 dead or disappeared.
The background of Brkics book - the massacre in Srebrenica,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the exhumations of those mass graves - is
no less staggering. In 1994, more than 7,000 townspeople and
refugees "disappeared" after the Bosnian Serb army
overran the town - which had been declared a U.N. safe haven.

BUT SANFORD cautions us early on against letting such numbers,
no matter how horrifying, speak for their victims. "[W]hen
people become numbers, their stories can be lost," she
warns. "Human agency is silenced through death, but it is
also silenced in other subtle and not so subtle ways."
According to Sanford, well-meaning outsiders may understand
massacres as something to be counted to prove violation of law,
but if it is knowledge and facts we want we must hear the stories
of those who survived. "Such testimonies," she writes,
"are not the stor[ies] of dead people." They "are
stories of the living - those who survived...."

Brkic implicitly affirms this claim when she recounts her
Muslim familys history in her account of working in the
morgues and gravesites of Bosnia-Herzegovina. While
Sanfords survivors speak for themselves, Brkic is removed
in time from the familial memories she tells. By creating a
narrative history, she gives voice to her familys survival
of ethnic cleansing.

For Sanford the telling of such stories is not a telling for
its own sake. Survivors testimony counters state terror by
breaking terrors silence. An exhumation is initiated when
communities organize and petition for a site to be exhumed; this
means survivors take the initiative in a process that returns
agency to them as well as their memories. Furthermore,
exhumations and the testimonies that accompany them provide
knowledge for the new political regimes emerging in the wake of
militarization. "There can be no rule of law or democracy
without attending to issues of truth and memory," Sanford
warns. She suggests that redress can take many forms, including
public testimony, mourning, and reburial - all of which begin to
constitute a new public space in which other survivors can
testify, find courage, and begin to reconstruct communities and
lives.

Exhumations are not only a process for gathering evidence by
forensic anthropologists and archaeologists. They are also a
process of "excavation of memory and the re-taking of public
space," by which Sanford refers to the creation of new
agency. This insight makes Sanfords longer, detailed
account the more hopeful of the two books. Brkic reports that
early in her experience with the exhumations a pathologist said
to her, "Do you think that if you see what became of them,
it will help you to understand? It wont." If
Brkics own experience contradicts this, she is not able to
tell us yet, though her historical characters speak eloquently of
their struggles.

What do these mass graves mean? If we have any hope of
understanding, we must risk listening to the testimony of
survivors through works such as these. Without such testimonies -
and the willingness to read them - we lose access to those
memories that constitute us as living communities of caring and
justice.

Linda Clum is a graduate of the University of Chicago
Divinity School, where she is director of admissions for the
graduate humanities division.

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